I Have Heard, and I Have Come Down

By some counts, around four hundred years pass between the last page of Genesis and the first of Exodus, and when the curtain lifts, everything has changed. Joseph is forgotten. A new Pharaoh rules who sees the growing family of Israel only as a threat, and the people who came to Egypt as honored guests are now an oppressed and groaning slave-nation, making bricks under the whip.

And then Yahweh moves — not because Israel earns it, but because He hears. This is the great rescue the whole Old Testament will look back on: a baby in a basket, an unconsumed burning bush, a divine Name spoken aloud, ten plagues that pull Egypt's gods off their thrones, a lamb's blood on the doorposts, and a sea that opens and then closes. Watch this week for the Lord who hears the cry of the helpless and comes all the way down to get them.

Exodus opens by setting the scene. Israel multiplies under oppression; two midwives quietly defy the king because they fear God more than Pharaoh; and a mother hides her baby in the reeds, where Pharaoh’s own daughter draws him out. Moses grows up royal, but kills an Egyptian in a rush of misplaced zeal, and flees to forty years of obscurity as a shepherd in Midian. Then the bush — burning, unconsumed — and the voice, and the Name: I AM WHO I AM, the God who simply is, who has seen Israel’s affliction and heard their cries and come down. Moses hides behind excuse after excuse; Yahweh answers every one and sends him on mission. The first meeting with Pharaoh only makes the slavery worse, and God responds by restating his covenant promise (chapter 6): I am the LORD, and I will bring you out.

Session two is the long duel between Pharaoh and Yahweh. The plagues are not random cruelty; they systematically dismantle Egypt’s gods, one domain at a time—the Nile, the livestock, the sun, and finally the firstborn. Again and again, Pharaoh’s refuses to listen. And then, on the last terrible night, God provides the way of escape: a lamb for each household, its blood painted on the doorframe, so that death passes over. Israel eats in haste, dressed to travel. By morning Egypt is wailing, and Pharaoh, at last, lets them go.

This week ends with the rescue itself and its aftermath. The Lord leads them by a pillar of cloud and fire — His own presence, visible, going ahead. Pharaoh has a change of heart and the chariots thunder after them, and Israel is trapped against the water. Then the sea opens, the people pass through on dry ground, and the returning waters bury the army that would have dragged them back to slavery. Moses and Miriam sing. And almost immediately the wilderness begins its work: bitter water made sweet, bread from heaven each morning, water struck from a rock, a battle with Amalek — the rescued people learning, slowly, to trust the God who carried them out.

From first to last, this is Yahweh’s initiative and His power. Israel builds nothing, wins nothing, earns nothing; they cry, and they are carried out. The Passover lamb and the parted sea become the two great pillars the whole Bible will lean salvation against.

The Exodus becomes the pattern every later rescue is measured by. The Passover lamb, whose blood turns death aside, becomes Christ our Passover — "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed," Paul writes, and the blood on the doorpost is the blood of the cross. The sea, through which a slave-people passes from bondage to freedom, becomes the water of baptism, the death and resurrection every believer is brought through. Even the word for what Yahweh did — the exodus — reappears at the Transfiguration, where Moses and Elijah speak with Jesus about the "departure," the exodus, He is about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Everything here is a rehearsal. The God who heard a slave-people groaning and came down to get them is the same God who came down all the way, in flesh, to lead a greater exodus out of a deeper slavery.